Chapter 29

Time for the annual sports festival. Well ... this was the first one, but Doug hoped that it would grow into a popular annual event. The sports events at the annual Mammoth Hunt had been the biggest part of the affair for the people, even though they had been completely unofficial. Now that they had vulcanized rubber, Doug had some hollow balls made and had organized a soccer league. Doug's Town had several teams and each of the other villages they were in contact with had their own teams. The teams were single gender simply because the boys were bigger than the girls at the same age, so Doug thought that the girls would have more fun if they did not have to struggle against the larger boys. Of course, like a lot of other things, this was subject to change.

Soccer took up so much space that it had to be played outside, but Doug had also introduced volleyball so that the kids would have a team sport to play indoors in bad weather. Volleyball was more popular among the girls, possibly because the entire uniform consisted of a sweat band. The better endowed girls did have a sports bra, but they wore it only when the pain of bouncing boobs got to be too much, and a hole was cut in the cup to "keep the nipple from being abraded" when a girl jumped around. They also started trimming their pussy hair into a team shape which they delighted in showing off at every opportunity. The poor boys had to wear a jockstrap because of the stress caused by all of the jumping around; this overdressing may have been what reduced the popularity of volleyball among the males, but the girls still enjoyed the show. Needless to say, the girls' volleyball games drew the biggest crowds.

Sports became a very popular wagering opportunity. Of course, there were bets on who would win, but there were bets on things like which girl would be the first to don a bra during a game (this one was very popular). Doug was worried that some girls would be injured because they waited too long to put on the bra, but his wives told him to let the girls alone—they knew what they were doing.

The second most popular sport for betting was the boys' soccer games. Here, the most common side wager was which boy would be the first to be penalized for kicking an opponent in the balls. It happened every game, and some of the boys had taken to wearing a groin cup for protection during the game. The first cups were carved from wood, but splinters were sometimes a problem, so one enterprising blacksmith had started a business of making the groin cups from bronze. Some coaches were insisting that every one of their players wear the groin cup while on the field. This cut down on the injuries to testicles, but raised the incidence of injuries from bruised or broken toes. Since the cups were worn outside the jockstrap, the practice started of marking them with a team logo, and, by the end of the first season, every team was so equipped. Now, the headband was not the only way of identifying which team a boy played for.

Incidentally, no spectator, male or female, was allowed to take a weapon to the contests. It seemed that the spectators became very excited and sometimes started to fight among themselves, thus the prohibition on weapons. The cheerleaders did all they could to stir up excitement in the audience, so there was always the possibility of a fight, whether or not a game was actually going on at the moment.

The referees were subject to considerable pressure to fix a match, either by bribery or threats, so the officials usually came from out of town and wore masks to hide their identity. The situation was so bad that Doug had to intervene personally several times. Usually, since the contests had become so popular, the threat of banishment from the audience was all that was needed to curb even the worst abusers, though they did have to be reminded sometimes. The ushers at the games were armed with truncheons, just in case, but they rarely had to use them.

Much to the chagrin of the people of Doug's Town, the first winner of the trophy in boys' soccer was from South Terminal (the southern end of the railroad) and the girls' winner was from East Beach (a town on the Yucatan beach where they could practice all year). On the other hand, the volleyball trophy winners were both from Doug's Town where they played all year. There were no hard feelings, except among the big money losers, and every team vowed to do better next year. The annual sports festival was, indeed, a momentous success! Nine towns competed, and everybody got some sort of trophy (Doug made sure of that).

Doug had two big projects in mind for Charles' engineering group for the coming year. The first involved voice radio. He was amazed how much he could remember from his early youth when he was a ham radio nut. He had learned enough of the vacuum tube technology from his reading at the time that he knew how to build a radio without transistors. Fixed capacitors in the range of .1 to .001 microfarad were going to be the big problem, other components could be made fairly simply.

The vacuum tubes, themselves, were not hard to build, just tedious. They used the same filament, a carbon fiber, as was used in the light bulbs. Now that they had collected elemental mercury at the sulfur mines, it was possible to build an effective vacuum pump, and they could use the "getter" principle to eliminate the last of the air in the glass envelope. The first tubes were very crude, but did work, so it took only about a year from start to finish to have a working prototype voice transmitter. Doug went for FM for its simplicity and inherent noise cancellation, so a lot of problems were solved before they ever cropped up.

The other big project was a fixed wing aircraft. The airships had a lot of inherent problems that would disappear with fixed wings, but the planes were harder to design and build. Doug saw a long term continuing need for the airships, but he wanted the higher speed and maneuverability of the fixed wing. Again, he knew something about airplanes since he had built and flown model airplanes in his youth, so he was able to steer Charles' designers toward a high-wing monoplane with a pulse jet power source.

The pulse jet, such as was used by the Germans for their Buzzbomb in WW2, is very easy to build and operate. It has certain limitations as compared to a turbojet, but it is orders of magnitude easier to build. The first one they built was powerful enough to tear itself from its mounting stand and play hell with the test facility. However, they soon got the beast under control and had a working unit available by the time the airframe had been built.

The initial tests of the airplane involved taxiing about on the soccer fields. Once Doug had built up his confidence with that, the power was increased and he was able to fly for a hundred yards or so. Again, when the confidence was high enough, the plane actually took off and flew around the field for about five minutes before Doug landed, a triumphant, but nervous wreck. Doug was the test pilot because he knew that he could not be hurt, no matter how disastrous a crash might happen.

On subsequent days, Doug flew farther and farther, until he was actually able to fly to South Terminal and back, nonstop. Nobody ever fully understood why Doug named this plane Kitty Hawk. Doug asked the designers to come up with a plane capable of carrying six passengers and two pilots. Once they could do that, he wanted to go for something even larger. Kitty Hawk was capable of cruising at about 250 MPH, and that was fast enough for Doug's present needs, but he eventually hoped for up to double that. He had no present desire to exceed the speed of sound, since they really did not have the resources to do that. Kitty Hawk was made mostly of plywood, and it looked like they would be using that for their airplane construction for some time. There was virtually no chance of turning out aluminum and magnesium airplane parts for at least 500 years.

By this time, the Zeppelin was finished and had passed all of its test program. The Zeppelin had a fantastic lifting capability; they had under calculated the lift from the hydrogen because of all of the safety factors they had stuffed into the formulas. Now that they had a real world prototype to work with, they were able to refine their formulas and get the engineering data they needed. They also found that they could insert more hydrogen envelopes inside the hull and get even more lifting capacity if they needed that.